Skip to content
Thoughtful, detailed coverage of everything Apple for 33 years
and the TidBITS Content Network for Apple professionals
Adam Engst

Adam Engst

Adam C. Engst is the publisher of TidBITS. He has written numerous books, including the best-selling Internet Starter Kit series, and many magazine articles thanks to Contributing Editor positions at MacUser, MacWEEK, and now Macworld. His innovations include the creation of the first advertising program to support an Internet publication in 1992, the first flat-rate accounts for graphical Internet access in 1993, and the Take Control electronic book series now owned and operated by alt concepts. His awards include the MDJ Power 25 ranking as the most influential person in the Macintosh industry outside of Apple every year since 2000, inclusion on the MacTech 25 list of influential people in the Macintosh technical community, and being named one of MacDirectory's top ten visionaries. And yes, he has been turned into an action figure.

Adam Engst No comments

HyperCard Confabulation

I appear to have opened an intellectual can of worms in TidBITS-102 with my comparison of HyperCard and QuickTime and my statement that HyperCard was, in some respects, a commercial failure

Adam Engst No comments

The PC is not a typewriter

You may wonder why I'm reviewing a book for PC clones here in TidBITS. First, I'm not blind to happenings elsewhere in the computer world; I just prefer to focus on the Mac, and second, I think everyone who has a friend learning publishing on a PC should give them this book to cut down on the egregious errors that show up in desktop published documents. "The PC is not a typewriter" is a direct descendent from Robin Williams's (yes, she of "The Little Mac Book" fame) previous book, "The Mac is not a typewriter." The heredity shows - this latest anti-typewriter book checks in at under 100 pages and is written in the same concise, friendly style

Adam Engst No comments

More on Video Memory

Even with the article we did on the IIsi and IIci video memory oddities, the issue remains murky to many people. Glenn Austin was kind enough to provide more detailed information which may further illuminate the matter, although for those of you who don't speak hex, I recommend just ignoring the address information - I did and still got the basic idea. Here's the memory map under System 6 and 7 on the IIsi and IIci, assuming (for the sake of discussion) that there is 8 MB of RAM in the machine, 2 banks of 4 MB RAM each, and the machine is 256-color capable: Where Description Size Logical address Bank A Video RAM $50000 $FBB00000 Bank A Main RAM $3B0000 $00400000 Bank B Main RAM $400000 $00000000 So the memory map looks something like this (in 24-bit mode, 32-bit is similar): ----------------- | Bank B | $00000000 (low) | RAM | |

Adam Engst No comments

Administrivia

Glenn Fleishman writes to expand on some points about the snazzy keynote presentation at Macworld Expo: Just some points of clarification. The photographer who assisted in John Sculley's presentation was Greg Heisler, a leading photojournalist, who recently did the Time Man of the Year (Ted Turner/CNN) cover (more on that below). The camera he used was a Kodak Professional Digital Camera System (DCS)

Adam Engst No comments

ClarisWorks Rave

This is not a review but a rave. It takes a lot to impress me these days, but I've been impressed by ClarisWorks. I'm not even all that likely to use it since I mostly do a ton of writing in Nisus and uAccess, but I suspect that if I need to do a compound document I'll use ClarisWorks

Adam Engst No comments

PC in a Mac/SoftPC

I've been a serious slug on this one, and I'd like to apologize to Insignia Solutions for taking so long. Some time ago they sent me SoftPC to review and I checked it out fairly thoroughly..

Adam Engst No comments

Mac in a PC/ANDOR ONE

I can see wanting to run the occasional PC program on your Mac, after all, I just spent 45 minutes writing about just that topic above. But I'm less sure about wanting to run the occasional Mac program on your PC

Adam Engst No comments

Microsoft Weird 4.00E

Word is starting to sound like Old MacDonald's Farm: "E I E I O." As promised, Microsoft released version 4.00E of Word to resolve problems with Word and the 68040 caches

Adam Engst No comments

System 7 Bug

Perfect timing once again. Just after we send out our issue on System 7 with information about a couple of problems it has, another pops up. Apparently a few people, not a lot, have been having files and folders disappear mysteriously from their hard drives

Adam Engst No comments

Administrivia

I don't enjoy making mistakes, but it does happen. In TidBITS-101, I suggested that a certain file available on ftp.apple.com held the full set of LaserWriter Plus TrueType fonts

Adam Engst No comments

TidBITS Mailing List

Wow! Internet users responded so enthusiastically that the volume temporarily swamped the mailer at Simon Fraser University. (Those of you who cannot get to the Internet might consider asking for an Internet gateway, on America Online and GEnie, for instance.) We are still working on ironing out all the quirks (sorry about those multiple mailfiles some of you received), so please bear with us

Adam Engst No comments

TidBITS Fileserver Pitfalls

No offense, but some of you have weird mailers. :-) There have been some requests to the TidBITS fileserver that it has been unable to respond to because the return address in the header is just too strange

Adam Engst No comments

Spring Apple Rumors

We couldn't fit these rumors in last week's issue, so in case you haven't heard, here's the latest. Two of the next Macs to show up will be a 68030-based LC and a docking notebook

Adam Engst No comments

Tune-Up Follow-up

There has been some discussion recently of problems with System 7 Tune-Up, most notably in concert with Ethernet boards and MacTCP. The problems appear to be isolated to just a few people, however, and Apple strongly recommends that everyone using any flavor 7.0.x install System 7 Tune-Up

Adam Engst No comments

IIsi/IIci Memory Usage

This article originally was part of our forthcoming special issue on System 7, but since it really isn't related to System 7 or software at all, we decided to include it here